Video: Rob Zombie on His Haunted-Record Horror Flick, Lords of Salem

Rob Zombie is never clean. For years he made metal-rock that sounded so rough and gnarly it scared mothers across America. As a director, he’s bringing the same down-and-dirty style to filmmaking.

That’s not to say that Zombie’s latest horror flick, The Lords of Salem, isn’t well-crafted. The rocker learned a thing or two working on earlier film’s like 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses and 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects. Now he’s brought that experience to his latest film, about a Massachusetts radio DJ (played by the director’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie) who gets a haunted vinyl record that may drive her crazy.

“With each movie, you can’t help but just learn more and more and more how to achieve,” Zombie told Wired at this year’s Comic-Con International (video above). “The whole goal is that you have something in your mind you’re trying to get it on film and I think Lords of Salem probably is more sophisticated in the way that it’s shot than the other ones.”

Salem, which premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival, was picked up earlier this week by Anchor Bay Films. No release date has been set, but once it hits theaters, audiences should be in for a gory ride. The movie, which Zombie also wrote, sucks viewers into the plight of Heidi (the radio station DJ) after she plays the record — “a gift from the Lords” — and finds that the eerie noises that come from it cause flashbacks of horrific days of Salem’s past.

Early reviews of the film from Toronto have been pretty solid — cult-film site Twitch called it a “slick Satanic head trip;” Playlist noted that even though parts of the movie were “a bit hard to swallow,” it was still Zombie’s “most ambitious film” so far. That was, after all, the goth-rocker’s objective.

“Now everything is so polished,” Zombie said. “The goal to make everything so perfect I find boring.”